Elizabeth A. Baker: Quadrivium
Aerocade Music

Anointing herself a “New Renaissance Artist” might seem a bold, even hubristic move on Elizabeth Baker's part, but the choice is legitimated by the contents of her ambitious debut album Quadrivium: two discs of music, the first consisting of minimalist piano pieces and the second ambient-styled settings, spoken word pieces, and electronic experiments. Well-considered, the album title refers to the subjects arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy that when paired with the those of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—compose the seven liberal arts. Certainly Baker's diverse range of interests is well-accounted for on the project: along with two hours of musical material, the release comes with a full-color booklet that includes poetry, photography, and illustrations by Baker as well as track-related info and reflections on communication, gender, and other timely issues. Something of a multi-instrumentalist, she augments her piano playing with electronics, voice, guitar, percussion, and toy piano, and she also advocates strongly for the latter: in 2016, Baker established the Florida International Toy Piano Festival to provide a platform for serious toy piano works, and the instrument's prominently featured on the album's otherwise synthesizer-heavy “An Outcast.”

All pieces are credited to Baker except Nathan Corder's “Sashay,” a thirteen-minute piano meditation whose ponderous musings introduce the two-disc set pensively. Beginning the set with such a restrained, slow-motion piece is in its own way audacious, risky even, yet it proves to be effective. Up next, the two “Command Voices” settings bring Baker's experimental sensibility to the fore, specifically by proposing a parallel between the voices a person suffering from psychosis ‘hears' and the relationship that develops between musicians and their instruments, the way in which the latter function as something more than inanimate beings during performance. With vibrators added to the piano, a chance element is introduced when keys played traditionally appear alongside pitches and noises over which the pianist has less control. During “Command Voices-415X,” for example, conventional piano sounds appear but do so as part of an exploration where the instrument's percussive potential is accentuated and its insides strummed, all such noises suggestive of voices ‘heard' by the individual ‘inside' but exteriorized for the sake of the musical display. The opening disc ends with two concise settings, “Four Explosions Expanding From the Center” and “Quarks,” that reinstate the explorative ambiance established by Corder's opening.

In dramatic contrast to the largely untreated piano pieces on disc one, the second concentrates on spoken word and experimental settings of various kinds. It's an interesting potpourri that begins with a brief series of musings on identity (“Identity Definitions”) before plunging into “Lateral Phases & Beat Frequencies,” fifteen minutes of electronically distorted spoken text (by guest Yvonne P. Small Baker) and spacey synthesizer warblings. During “Microbial Systems,” Baker builds her speaking voice into a polyphony of layered voices (“Our bodies consists of countless systems within larger systems which accumulate to create and facilitate the perception of life”), whereas distorted vocal treatments convey a sense of alienation during “What is done in silence,” the inhuman voice presentation reinforced by robotic enumerations of number sequences. Rounding out the release are two long-form instrumental settings, the first, “HEADSPACE,” a brooding, fifteen-minute electroacoustic piece packed with shimmering textures, bass throb, and aromatic synth whooshes, and “GHB-The Natural Calm & Synthetic Danger,” a twenty-three-minute excursion into New Age textures and at times foreboding zones; as the shadows fall and darkness creeps in, shuddering noises and field recording-like details create a convincing approximation of a visit to Hades, even if the piece ends on a roller-coaster wave of synthetic sparkle (GHB, incidentally, is a naturally occurring neurological compound found in wine and chocolate that can also in its synthetic form be put to nefarious use as a date rape drug).

May 2018